AVAILABLE 9-9-2026

(NOTE: "'Saudade' is a Portuguese word that describes a deep, melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves, with the collective realization that the object of yearning might never return.")
 
She no longer exists, yet something of her remains. Each winter, when the blackberry vines should lie barren beneath the frost, they inexplicably awaken and bear their dark, sweet fruit for her, continuing to do so in her memory. She may be referred to as a ghost that wanders the garden, consciously tending the vines—but she is something less tangible than an apparition: a residual imprint of something she did so lovingly and so often that the earth itself seems to remember.
 
Yet the blackberries are not the garden's only anomaly. Over the years, other impossible growths have appeared alongside them, as though her hand continues to cultivate the garden long after the hand itself has disappeared. On one side, ghostly jasmine has entwined itself among the blackberry vines, flowering inexplicably in the heart of winter. Its pale blossoms emerge through frost-covered leaves, releasing their fragrance into air far too cold to sustain them. The jasmine seems almost inseparable from the vines now, as though the two have somehow learned to survive together, altered by the same mysterious force that causes the blackberries to fruit beneath the frost.
 
On the opposite side of the garden, another strange union occurs. Pink peppercorn trees produce clusters of rosy berries beside tuberoses that push themselves impossibly through the frozen earth. Their waxen white flowers rise from the winter garden and release their creamy, intoxicating perfume into the still, cold air, while the pepper berries glow like tiny embers among the muted vegetation. Neither should flourish here at this time of year, and yet they do—not merely surviving the winter, but seeming to thrive because of it.
 
Every year the ritual repeats. The impossible winter blackberries ripen; frost gathers upon them like sugar. Jasmine flowers among the thorny vines. Pink pepper berries blush against the cold while tuberoses emerge from frozen ground. And somewhere among them remains the suggestion of the woman who once tended them—not quite visible, but never entirely absent.  Her physical form does not return to the garden each winter.  The garden remembers her.
 
And in remembering her, it continues what she began: cultivating the berries, awakening the flowers, recreating their perfumes, and preserving the memory of those frosted blackberry vines year after year. It is not quite a haunting, but something stranger and perhaps more intimate—a memory caught within the landscape itself, returning with winter as faithfully as the season, growing stronger rather than weaker with the passing years.

Perhaps this seemingly sentient garden itself experiences a kind of saudade—an aching remembrance of the woman whose loving hands once tended it. Unable to accept her absence, it continues to bloom impossibly through each winter, preserving the flowers, fruits and fragrances she cherished. The garden does not survive because she haunts it; it survives because it misses her...

Saudade
        Blackberry, evening frost, jasmine, pink pepper, tuberose, silver musk, java sandalwood, black              pepper, chrysanthumum
85-15 feminine